After Dark
by Lavenderpaw
Summary: Stoick can never explain to his son what his mother meant to them. One-shot.


**A/N**: . Thank you for visiting, it's awesome to finally write another fan fiction about a dragon.

_ _

OO

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~ _It's a damn, cold night;_

_Trying to figure out this life._

_Won't you take me by the hand, take me somewhere new, I _

_Don't know who you are, but I'm…_

_I'm with you. ~_

- Avril Lavine.

I.

Stoick scratched at his straight, bouncy red locks, wondering where the formula that wife had 'made' was, and trying to keep a gurgling, hiccupping Harold from falling off his lap. If there was one thing Astral wouldn't stand, it was a son with a flattened cranium.

"By, Gods!" He bit down hard on his bottom lip, bruising it a bit in the process. "If I don' find that dern bottle and reattach the dern rubber top, my wife's gunna have my head on a spigot…" The vast male Viking briefly wondered why the rubber stopper resembled a ---.

"_Stoick the Vast_!" A booming voice shrieked from the distance. "Where my son at, ya bi' ol' bloated buffoon!? I swear, you dropped every other babe ya ever held, if I find _one_---"

"Der!" He threw open the heavy wooden door by the rope handle. "My, ya look-."

"Stow it, ya crazy!" The woman before him was twenty years older then himself, she had muscles that ran like jagged rocks down her arms and a girth that only jiggled in a quarter of her abdomen from where her son, nick-named Hiccup, had been pocketed until labor. "Now,

Where is he? Where is ma son?" Astral's striking, streaked jade eyes ricocheted off of the walls in a roaming search for her child, like that of a frantic reptile searching quite in vain for any sign of her hatchlings. "Stoick, ya goofball galoot. If ya s'much as tilted him in-,"

Her tirade ceased when she laid her probing gaze on her young son. Hiccup turned just so in his father's buckskin-sleeved arm, rose his own matching gaze up at his mother and let a delightfully gummy smile cross his face. Softening, Astral gently took the baby into her callused hands, settled him into her sun-burnt arm, and hooked her other around Stoick's meaty neck. He cringed, a bit fearful being this close to armpit stench and visibly relaxed as Astral settled a kiss onto his black-and-blued lips. They looked into each other's eyes.

"Der, it does get awful lonely wit cha gone."

"Well," She cradled both males in her arms and plopped down onto an over-sized ox-hide sofa, "I guess I can take a short break from ma busy life..." All three eased off into asleep.

"Ya know the other guys would have meh for breakfast if they knew we slept like this."

Astral opened a large green eye and sent him a self-assured look. "That's why _I_ go out."

…

Dawn fluttered in like the awakening of a small lamp, wobbling its way to its mother's supply of fresh milk. A shadow grazed over the dew-soaked grass as heavy heaves and huffs were being made, and a sweat-stroked Astral threw a wheel-shaped rock upwards into the just recently lit skyline. She smiled as her chest pumped in great breaths, and she did not even bother to wipe at the profusion of sweat that slathered her tanned physique.

"My, oh my! So we did find a use fer them blasted things cavemen invented after all."

The cracked piece of U-shaped gray rock plunked perfectly into a metal stake in the earth.

Astral turned to look at Stoick, giving him a lopsided grin and then straightening up into her proud stand as the man turned to go back inside. "Wait a min, where ya goin' to der?"

"Well, ya know, mop the floors, polish the dragon slaying implements n' dust the couch."

"Well today," She opened her arms out wide.

"Ah, thank ya der!" Stoick leapt up into her arms. "I've been waitin' ta announce our l-."

Astral dropped him squarely on the buttocks. "No, der, not that. I want to take our son out today." She smiled ear-to-ear, adjusted her sword belt and helped her husband up onto his feet by way of grasping his arms and situating him. "That is, if ma Harold's not sleepin'."

Stoick sighed under his burnt-red beard and adjusted his own body gear. "Well, I can' say I'm turned on to the idea of endangerin' Hiccup's life, but it is sort of up to me, isn't it?"

That's how it worked in their place of residence; all of the men had the first say of their children while a woman headed everything else. After all, everyone knew a 'female' was in no way fit to rear a child or keep up with proper house cleaning. So it all fell to Stoick.

"Please'um?" Astral asked.

He turned to her with heady crystal blue eyes. "Promise not to crush him on a rock cliff?"

"Anymore then I would crush _you _on a rock cliff."

They embraced. A coo was heard from the opened door of their house and they smiled lovingly at each other. Most of the Vikings did not care for this open display of affection, but Astral felt it was just a small step in possibly showing that in order to conquer all that was terrorizing them, what she had once called a 'misunderstanding', that they must understand one another and open affection in public was just a part of it. Astral pulled back, gave Stoick a good head butt that sent him to the ground and hulked off to gather up their son.

When the Viking turned to look off to his left, the stoned horse-shoe had fallen with it's tips pointing down to the ground.

…

The mountains that surrounded the island of Berk had lovely weather this time of the year; Astral took in the sights off and on as she strode forward. Young Hiccup contiued to drift in and out of sleep as they approached the base of one such mountain. Astral inhaled in a deep breath, slipped her son a look and then went to clasp at her left breast plate. She then released her breath and yanked off the concave securer, chuckling as flesh fell in a bag of sag. The woman then coaxed Hiccup into the underside of the breast plate and sighed; he opened his green eyes and smiled widely as she worked to knot a netting of rope in to it.

"I want ta show you something Hiccup," Astral told him and, with him safely attached to her side, she scaled up the mountain-side one-handed, "Ya see, in our tribe a man wants a woman with more brawn then brain, ma boy. And maybe if you were ta see somethin' ---,

Well, somethin' different. Maybe ya would see things da way I do." She paused just right before they peaked at the top, and turned to her son. "I don' mean ta sound h'vy hearted."

Hiccup cocked his head quizzically at her.

"We'll make this a light-hearted session then," Astral smiled fondly down at him and let the boy peer down into a nest residing on the center of the mountain top, raising him up.

"Mama," He muttered.

"I don' know where she is," The woman sighed, gazing down sadly at the small abandoned dragon egg, "But I know wherever she might be," Astral lowered her large face down to where Hiccup could reach out from her breast plate and touch her, "She'd wan' her boy happy as can be." Astral nuzzled a cooing Hiccup, away from disapproving eyes of men.

It was considered a shame to be seen publicly showing affection to your child.

As they were about to crawl back down, and leave the nest at rest, a low growl came from an adjoining mountain-side. Astral turned her startled green eyes on a pair of mustard hue saucers staring her down. In one blow, she could strike the dragon out. The shadowy-colored creature reared back on its legs, turning in a dangerous curving turn as she kept her eyes locked on a dragon she had never seen before in her life. Astral gently slid off a slumbering Hiccup beside the sapphire oval and stepped back with a fiery look in her eye.

Dragon and dragon slayer circled one another, interlocked not in the need to eliminate one another but to do what any mother would do: protect her offspring. Astral reared back on her left heel, and levered up her massive arm in a coax for the creature to try.

"Jest try, ya bloody hell bringer." She cracked every muscle in her body and shot the salamander-looking creature with a bull's eye warning. "Trust ma," She lugged out the huge sword strapped across her chest and rose the stone blade to the sky by it's leathery hilt, "I'll fill ya full of mountain choppins' fer I let ya get ya nastiness on ma babe here."

Astral flung her great girth forward and roared a battle cry to the twilight falling horizon.

The Night Fury dove straight up into air and went right for the Viking woman's heart.

Below, a suddenly uncomfortable Hiccup reached out and cuddled the egg close to his chest and smiled only a small smile. The barely self-aware child finally awoke from a hazy nap and looked up to see a red-streaked brown arm gather him up, and was then forced by the sudden motion to release his hold on the egg, causing his face to scrunch around the corners and then into the middle. Astral, bleeding profusely, staggered down.

She and her son would not be found until after dark.

II.

"So, this is where you found us Dad?"

"Yes," Stoick rested a burly hand on his son's arm, "I swore from that day on that it was all…" the former Viking rubbed at his reddening eyes, sighing heavily, "that I'd change."

"And we have." Harold looked up to his father and turned to look at the base of the large mountain range, sucking in a deep breath and giving Stoick's arm a long two-armed hug.

Toothless moved forward from the bushes, sized up the large lower half of the rock wall and then allowed his yellow-saucer eyes to scale up to the rapidly narrowing peak of the mountain, he then looked at Hiccup with a narrowed gaze and pulled his lips up in a grin.

The sounds of a distant yet far off call that only he could register resounded the ranges.

…

The End.


End file.
